AI Has Given a Voice to People Who Will Never be Wordsmiths

I am not a wordsmith.

I am an accountant, a strategist and a businessperson. I have spent decades analysing businesses, solving problems, making decisions, developing strategies and explaining challenging commercial situations to boards, executives and teams.

Give me a business problem, and I can pull it apart.

Give me a blank sheet of paper and ask me to write 2,000 eloquent words about it, and that has historically been a very different proposition.

I can put together a presentation. I can stand in a room and explain highly complex issues in plain language. I can see patterns, connections, risks and opportunities at speed. But writing has never been the natural medium through which my brain works.

And I am not remotely unusual.

That is one reason I believe we are underestimating one of the most important consequences of artificial intelligence.

AI isn't simply allowing people to produce more words. It is allowing people with something valuable to say to finally find a way to say it.

We have confused the ability to write with the ability to think

For a very long time, professional life has disproportionately rewarded people who are good at communicating through the written word.

Applications are written. Reports are written. Proposals are written. Business plans are written. Articles are written. Policies are written. Funding submissions are written.

Even our education system has traditionally assessed enormous amounts of human capability through someone's ability to convert their knowledge into words on a page. But writing ability and thinking ability are not the same thing.

Someone can be an extraordinary engineer and a poor writer. Someone can understand animals, landscapes, manufacturing processes, human behaviour, finance or machinery at a level few others ever will and still struggle to articulate that knowledge in 1,500 beautifully structured words.

A dyslexic entrepreneur may have an exceptional commercial brain while finding written communication exhausting.

A highly experienced tradesperson may understand problems instinctively after thirty years of doing the job but have no desire whatsoever to sit at a computer writing about what they know.

A founder may have hundreds of ideas racing through their head and struggle to organise them into a coherent document.

And sometimes the issue isn't ability at all.

It is time.

There are countless people running businesses, raising families, managing teams and building careers who simply do not have three hours available to wrestle with a piece of writing that could take somebody else 40 minutes.

Historically, much of that knowledge has simply remained inside people's heads.

AI is changing that.

The blank page is no longer quite so blank

One of the things I find most powerful about using AI is that I don't necessarily have to begin with writing.

I can begin with thinking. I can explain an idea badly. I can talk around it. I can contradict myself. I can remember another point halfway through. I can say, "That's not quite what I mean." I can add context. I can ask for something to be rearranged.

And something that existed as a collection of thoughts becomes structured enough for another person to understand.

AI doesn't have to replace the thinking. It helps with the translation of thinking.

There is a substantial difference between asking a machine:

"Tell me what I think about leadership."

and saying:

"Here is what I have learned about leadership over thirty years. Help me organise these thoughts so that somebody else can understand them."

The first outsources the idea. The second helps communicate it.

That, for me, is where AI has become game-changing.

The person behind the words still matters

One criticism of AI-generated writing is that you can often recognise it. And that criticism isn't unfair.

Certain sentence structures appear repeatedly. Particular words become fashionable. Everything can become terribly polished. Paragraphs can have suspiciously neat conclusions. Suddenly everyone on LinkedIn appears to have undergone a profound transformation involving resilience, authenticity and a strategically placed em dash.

Plenty of dreadful AI-generated content exists. But plenty of dreadful human-generated content existed before AI arrived. The problem isn't necessarily the tool. It is what we ask it to do.

If I ask AI to manufacture an opinion for me, the result may well be generic because the thinking behind it is generic. If I give it my experiences, arguments, disagreements, examples, questions, and conclusions, something fundamentally different is at its core.

The raw material is human. That doesn't mean every sentence must remain exactly as AI produces it. Quite the opposite. Change it. Delete things. Tell it you hate a phrase. Tell it that you would never use that word. Ask why it has structured something in a particular way. Put something back that it removed. Make a paragraph less polished. Challenge an assumption. Add another story. Ask for the opposing argument.

Learning to use AI is also learning about yourself

Another benefit I don't think gets discussed enough. Used thoughtfully, AI can begin to show you patterns in your own thinking and communication. You start noticing how you explain things. You discover which ideas you return to repeatedly. You notice the words you dislike. You begin recognising when something technically says what you asked for but doesn't feel like you.

That is useful information.

Over time, you become better at saying: "No. That's too corporate." "That's technically correct, but you've missed the point." "I wouldn't say that." "Make this more conversational." "You're making me sound more certain than I actually am." "Keep this part. That's important." "Challenge me on this."

These are communication skills. You are learning to articulate not only what you think, but how you want that thinking represented.

And someone who has never considered themselves a writer can start becoming a better communicator through the process.

AI should be a sparring partner, not an autopilot

AI makes producing something incredibly easy. And easy can become lazy. If we stop questioning what it produces, we risk publishing perfectly competent words containing very little of ourselves.

We also risk accepting information that sounds authoritative but isn't correct. AI can misunderstand. It can oversimplify. It can confidently take an argument somewhere you never intended it to go.

It therefore needs judgement. And judgement becomes more important, not less, as the technology improves.

The valuable skill of the future may not be the ability to personally perform every component of a task. It may increasingly be the ability to recognise whether the output is good. That requires knowledge.

If I use AI to help me communicate about business turnaround, I have decades of experience to assess what it gives me. I know when something doesn't ring true. I know when an important commercial reality has disappeared beneath a neat theoretical answer.

Expertise still matters.

In fact, AI can make expertise more visible because experts no longer need an entirely separate skill set in professional writing before they can share their knowledge.

The pros and cons of using AI to express your ideas

There are real advantages, but there are also real risks.

The advantages

It removes the challenge of the blank page.
Starting becomes considerably easier when you can begin with a verbalised conversation rather than a perfectly constructed opening paragraph.

It makes communication more accessible.
People who struggle with spelling, grammar, written structure, or dyslexia can focus more energy on the idea they are trying to communicate.

It captures knowledge that might otherwise disappear.
Experienced people have extraordinary amounts of tacit knowledge. AI can help turn some of that experience into material that can be shared, taught and passed on.

It saves vast amounts of time.
A rough collection of thoughts can be organised far more quickly than starting from scratch.

It allows iteration without embarrassment.
You can ask the same question six different ways. You can say you don't understand something. You can completely change direction. There is no exhausted colleague sitting opposite you wondering why you've changed the introduction for the ninth time.

It can improve your own communication.
By observing what works and what doesn't, you gradually become more conscious of structure, clarity, tone and your own preferences.

It allows more people to participate.
Perhaps most importantly, it lowers one of the barriers between having valuable knowledge and being able to share it.

The risks

You can lose your own voice.
Accept everything without questioning it, and your writing can quickly become generic.

You can outsource your thinking.
There is an enormous difference between using AI to express an idea and asking AI to have the idea for you.

It can be wrong.
Fluent language should never be confused with factual accuracy.

Volume can replace value.
The ability to produce 20 articles instead of two doesn't mean anybody needs 20 articles from you.

It can make us intellectually lazy.
If we immediately hand every difficult thought over to a machine, we risk losing some of the value that comes from wrestling with an idea ourselves.

It can make everyone sound the same.
This is already happening. Recognising AI patterns and deliberately removing them will increasingly become part of good communication.

Start with what you actually think

If you want AI to help you communicate without replacing you, don't begin with the perfect prompt.

Begin with yourself. Talk. Type badly. Write bullet points. Dictate into your phone. Tell a story. Explain why something annoys you. Describe what happened. Say what you learned. Then ask AI to help you make sense of it. Read the result and pay attention to your reaction.

What feels right?

What makes you think, "Yes! That's what I was trying to say"?

And what makes you recoil slightly because you would never speak like that? Change it. Ask for another version. Tell it why you don't like the first one.

The more actively involved you remain, the more useful the process becomes. And don't be afraid to ask for help with the prompting itself. If you don't know how to ask AI to do something, say exactly that:

"I know what I am trying to achieve, but I don't know the best way to ask you. Help me construct the instruction."

There is no prize for knowing the cleverest prompt.

The objective is communication.

Perhaps we need to reconsider what authorship means

There will undoubtedly continue to be debate about what constitutes AI-generated content. But I think we need more nuance than simply asking whether AI was involved.

If someone has spent thirty years developing expertise, dictates their experience and ideas, argues with an AI system about how those ideas should be structured, corrects its interpretations, changes the language, and ultimately publishes the result, whose thinking is it?

For me, the more important question is not:

"Did AI write this?"

It is:

"Whose ideas are these?"

Because there is a profound difference between artificial intelligence generating empty content to fill space and artificial intelligence helping a human being communicate knowledge they genuinely possess.

The latter is invaluable to the person who has always struggled to communicate through words.

A world with more voices in it

We are still at the beginning of understanding what AI will change. There are legitimate concerns around employment, intellectual property, accuracy, education, privacy and our increasing reliance on technology. None of those should be dismissed.

But neither should we overlook what is being unlocked.

There are people all over the world with decades of knowledge who have never written an article. People with extraordinary stories who have never written a book. Entrepreneurs who understand their businesses intimately but struggle to produce a business plan. People with dyslexia who have spent their lives being judged partly through a medium that makes it harder for them to demonstrate what they know.

Their ideas did not suddenly become valuable when AI arrived.

They were valuable all along.

What has changed is the barrier between having those ideas and being able to communicate them.

And I can say that from personal experience.

I could not do what I am doing now without the support of AI.

It helps me write articles like this one. It helps me build and refine websites. It helps me take the knowledge, ideas and experience that exist in my head and turn them into the platforms and materials through which I can educate other people.

I am not, and never will be, a wordsmith. I don't need to pretend otherwise. I think that is something worth celebrating. What I am is a very talented businesswoman with decades of experience to share.

AI cannot replace the decades of experience behind what I teach. It hasn't sat in boardrooms when difficult decisions had to be made. It hasn't walked into businesses when things were going badly wrong. It hasn't had to deal with the consequences of a strategy that looked perfectly sensible on paper but didn't work in practice. It hasn't learned from mistakes, changed its mind when reality proved it wrong, managed people through uncertainty, or felt the enormous difference between knowing business theory and actually running a business.

That knowledge comes from experience. I've gained mine from the grassroots up: through finance, operations, strategy, leadership, growth, restructuring, turnaround, and the countless human realities that sit underneath all of them.

AI is helping me communicate that experience more effectively and make more of it available to other people. And perhaps that is the relationship with AI we should be aiming for. To use technology to help us communicate, create and accomplish more. To let it remove barriers where barriers don't need to exist. To let it give people a voice when the mechanics of writing have previously got in their way. Just don't confuse access to information with experience.

At Ogilvie Business School, we believe learning face-to-face from people who have actually done the work has enormous value. So come and sit in the room. Ask questions. Challenge things. Bring your own experiences and problems. Learn from people whose knowledge has been earned through doing, succeeding, failing, solving, adapting and doing it again.

Use AI. Embrace what it makes possible. And never underestimate the power of real human experience.